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Mel Ayton: Review of Joan Mellen’s A Farewell To Justice – Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, And The Case That Should Have Changed History

Mr. Ayton is the author of The JFK Assassination: Dispelling the Myths (2002) and Questions Of Controversy: The Kennedy Brothers (2001). His new book, A Racial Crime - James Earl Ray and the Murder of Martin Luther King Jr., was published in the United States by ArcheBooks in January 2005.

New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison began his investigation into the JFK assassination by exposing alleged contradictions in the Warren Report, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President Kennedy. Joan Mellen asserts that Oswald was no Marxist and was in fact working with both the FBI and the CIA, as well as with U.S. Customs, and that the attempts to discredit Garrison’s investigation reached the highest levels of the U.S. government.

Mellen claims to have uncovered new evidence establishing the intelligence agencies’ roles in both a president’s assassination and its cover-up. She believes the cover-up began well before the assassination. Oswald, she alleges, was closely connected to CIA-sponsored anti-Castro figures in New Orleans who included Clay Shaw, David Ferrie private investigator Guy Banister and his associate Jack Martin.

Central to Mellen’s thesis is her assertion that the CIA and FBI worked with the conspirators to cover up the assassination.The massive cover-up began, Mellen posits, when Oswald, in the company of Shaw and Ferrie, applied for a job at the mental hospital in Jackson, Louisiana. According to Garrison, conspirators wanted Oswald working at the hospital so they could later switch his records to support a frame-up in which Oswald would be characterized as a mental patient. On the strength of an interview with anti-Cuban exile Angelo Murgado (alias Angelo ‘Kennedy’) she also alleges – most strikingly of all - that Robert Kennedy was aware of Oswald and his connection to the FBI before the assassination. RFK purportedly put Oswald under surveillance and had his Cuban associates tracking Oswald's movements during the summer of 1963.

On ‘Black Op Radio’ (Show 234, 2005), Mellen stated that, in March 1967 it was her to-be- husband, Ralph Schoenman (- a JFK conspiracy advocate and committed Marxist), who gave Jim Garrison the now infamous articles about Clay Shaw that had been published in the Italian newspaper ‘ Paese Sera’. The articles stated that Shaw had been on the board of directors of an organisation in Rome which the articles alleged had been a CIA front. As Max Holland has demonstrated, the evidence indicates that these articles convinced Garrison that Shaw was a CIA agent and that the agency was behind the assassination.

Despite Max Holland’s debunking of the Italian newspaper’s stories in his article ‘The Lie That Linked The CIA To The Kennedy Assassination’ Mellen unashamedly gives credence to their distorted facts. As Max Holland wrote, ‘Paese Sera’s successful deception turns out to be a major reason why many Americans believe, to this day, that the CIA was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.’

Mellen’s ‘proof’ of the invalidity of Holland’s research centers around the simple denials of the editors of Paese Sera who said their reporters were not duped by the KGB and that ‘Garrison had focused on the CIA well before the publication of the Paese Sera articles’.This is a pivotal issue because Garrison, in his memoir ‘On The Trail Of The Assassins’, lied about when he received the articles; that lie suggests the true significance of these articles to him. Moreover, the articles were NOT already in the works long before Shaw’s arrest, as Mellen claims, on the basis of interviews conducted by the aforementioned Ralph Schoenman. It was Shaw’s arrest that prompted those stories. And Garrison only knew of the alleged CIA/Shaw connection through the newspaper articles. Readers should also be aware that the KGB was doing everything in its power to link the JFK assassination with the CIA, and that Paese Sera was an outlet for KGB disinformation, as the recently released Mitrokhin Archive proves.

Branding authors who reject JFK conspiracy theories as 'CIA assets' is Mellen's favourite smear tactic in the book. It is a common tool used by JFK conspiracy writers - it is also 'McCarthyite' in nature. Don Bohning, a former Miami Herald reporter and author of 'The Castro Obsession' (2005) is incensed with references made by Mellen that he was a 'CIA sponsored' reporter. Bohning contacted the book's publishers, suggesting it was libelous. They contacted Mellen and said she agreed to change the description to 'CIA linked.' The reference is still extremely misleading, Bohning said. “ (I)...never took a cent from the CIA and was outraged by the implication - along with the terms 'writer asset' and 'utilized'.” (Email to the author, 3.10.2005)….Top editors at the Herald were well aware – and approved – of my contacts with the CIA during the 1960s.”(Email to the author 9-10-05).

Mellen’s theories, which center around a CIA conspiracy, make little sense once examined closely. Her allegations that Clay Shaw was created and supervised by the CIA have been examined time and time again by JFK researchers and found to be false. In reality, Clay Shaw had simply been one of thousands of businessmen who had once been a source for the CIA through its Domestic Contact Service (DCS). (See John McAdams’s website). Instead, as Patricia Lambert has proven, in a far superior examination of the Garrison case, ‘False Witness’, Shaw was a Kennedy supporter, a decorated war veteran and a gifted intellectual who had rightly been found innocent of the conspiracy charges Garrison made against him.

Mellen’s allegations that the CIA wanted to impede Garrison’s investigation is true but not because the Agency had something sinister to hide. The Agency was in a quandary because of its innocuous relationship with Shaw and it monitored Garrison’s investigation, alarmed that the New Orleans DA was wrongly linking the Agency with the JFK assassination. As Max Holland wrote, “Shaw was not ……developed as a covert operative…. the relationship (with the CIA) just lapsed. He had never received any remuneration and probably considered the reporting a civic duty that was no longer urgent once the hostility between the two superpowers became frozen in place and a new world war no longer appeared imminent…. Garrison’s allegations— the “grossest we have seen from any responsible American official”—gave the Agency fits, just as they did Shaw and Shaw’s lawyers.” (see: The Lie That Linked CIA to the Kennedy Assassination by Max Holland)

It is difficult to exaggerate the number of previously debunked myths Mellen resurrects.In fact her book is no different from previous JFK conspiracy books which promote theories based on gossip, innuendo and tall tales from unreliable sources. She rehabilitates old shibboleths about the Garrison investigation including the myth that Oswald was in possession of ‘a Minox spy camera’ and Ferrie’s alleged possession of Oswald’s library card both of which have been examined carefully over the years and found to be false. Mellen’s thesis also depends on the veracity of New Orleans ‘character’ Jack Martin and countless other actors in the New Orleans ‘drama’ whose stories have been fully researched. There are too many to cover in this book review but the following are examples as to the lengths to which this author will go in building her conspiracy tale.

Mellen recycles as if true the testimony of witnesses who were discredited before the Shaw case came to trial in 1969, or who were never called to testify precisely because they lacked credibility. She apparently assumes that readers will not know that these witnesses were discredited. Her ‘new’ revelations almost always center around the tales told by anti-Cuban exiles and others on the periphery like Thomas Edward Beckham, a semi-literate who claims, along with dozens of other fantasists, to have observed Ferrie, Oswald and Ruby together; Richard Case Nagell and Jules Rico Kimble, known liars and fantasists, (see http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/nagell1.htm )

Mellen also plays the conspiracists’ game of ‘A knows B who knows C who knows D therefore A must know D’.

One witness who Mellen interviewed is Angelo Murgado, mentioned earlier, who changed his name to ‘Angelo Kennedy’. Angelo purports to have known about RFK’s pre-assassination knowledge of Oswald. Yet Don Bohning’s Cuban exile contacts in Florida have poured scorn on Murgado’s credibility. (email to the author, 3.10.2005) He joins the battalions of ‘soldier of fortune’ types who have, for 40 years, claimed some knowledge of the JFK assassination – all of them supplying no credible evidence of their participation whatsoever.

The most important witness in the trial of Clay Shaw, was Perry Raymond Russo and Garrison's case was built around Russo's testimony. According to Mellen, Russo was truthful - but the facts reveal otherwise. Russo began recanting his conspiracy stories almost immediately, beginning in 1967 to his polygraph examiners. In 1971, Russo recanted to Clay Shaw’s attorneys, admitting to them that he was coached, brainwashed and hypnotized into lying under oath. In the mid-1990’s, shortly before his death from a heart attack, he recanted again, this time to author Patricia Lambert.

A particularly glaring example of the kind of distortions Mellen routinely engages in concerns a CIA officer named Joseph James Martin. Mellen cites CIA documents about him, and alleges he is identical to the ‘Jack Martin’ who was an associate of Guy Banister. It is a preposterous claim when the full CIA record on this issue and Jack Martin’s FBI biography is examined. Garrison’s initial ideas and actions were based on allegations made by Martin who was frequently characterized by people who knew him as a notorious storyteller. Acting on Martin's stories David William Ferrie, a former airlines pilot who had worked for Carlos Marcello’s lawyer, G. Wray Gill, was put under round the clock surveillance. It was years before Martin's allegations against Ferrie were discovered to be inspired by a long-standing grudge.The mystery is why Garrison, who knew Martin was alcoholic, fabricated information, and had received treatment for mental illness, took his allegations seriously. Hubie Badeux, the former chief of the New Orleans Police Intelligence Division told author Gerald Posner, "[Martin] was goofy to begin with and lied all the time". Badeux said Martin had a reputation for "wild and crazy stories." Jack Martin later claimed, with some justification, that Garrison's investigation was based on “information” he and a friend, David Lewis, "made up".

In constructing her story Mellen takes many leaps of the imagination. For example she states that Oswald wanted to name his first child David, if it was a boy. She then links this fact with the ridiculous assertion that the only ‘David’ in Oswald’s life was David Ferrie. Mellen posits this as proof of Oswald’s connection to the alleged JFK conspirator.This is not analysis but paranoia.

Mellen’s book has the façade of scholarship but it is in fact a hocus pocus act. Many of her strongest assertions are not footnoted and thus undocumented. Incredibly, she gives credence to an anonymous telephone call to Garrison in which the caller, allegedly a friend of Shaw’s, said the DA’s suspicions about Shaw were correct. She also ignores documents she doesn’t like, i.e. that contradict her inferences. She claims, without backing it up, that the FBI and CIA files are ‘papered’, which presumably means they contain false documents. She also claims that incriminating documents were destroyed. Yet she also (mis)uses CIA and FBI documents to ‘make’ her case when it suits her purpose. She has created a researcher’s ‘perfect universe’.Documents she doesn’t like are inserted concoctions, and important documents that would prove her allegations are missing (though she purports to know their contents)..One wonders why she bothers with documents at all. The answer is it gives her book a façade of accuracy.

People who want to believe Mellen doubtless will, but those who are at least a little skeptical should read Patricia Lambert’s book ‘False Witness’. Lambert meticulously traces Garrison's story from the very beginning of his investigation, through the Shaw trial and its aftermath. She provides compelling evidence that Jim Garrison's case against Shaw was non-existent, and that Garrison himself was a reckless, mentally unstable demagogue.

Mellen’s book is typical of many conspiracy books in that the impact of her tome depends on the reader having little independent knowledge of the facts of the case or the dramatis personae in this shocking tale of the abuse of a District Attorney’s power. Judged on its merits, the book should have no impact on the history of the JFK Assassination .

In November 1997 the Assassination Records Review Board, instituted by Congress as a result of public pressure after the release of the movie 'JFK', released Clay Shaw's secret diary. In it he wrote of being wrongly persecuted, "I am still dismayed to find myself charged with the most heinous crime of the century but I am completely innocent and the feeling of being a stunned animal seems to have gone now." In another section of Shaw's diary he wrote about his feelings of being accused of having associated with Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferrie, "Aside from any questions of guilt or innocence,” wrote Shaw, “anyone who knows me knows that I would have better sense than to plot with two nuts like that."

Posted on Thursday, November 17, 2005 at 5:19 PM | Comments (15) | Return

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